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Of these two aspects, board and bundled hardware, I feel it best to tackle the bundled hardware first. Don't get me wrong, the board itself is impressive, but the bundle that Abit included is beyond thorough. So let's get started.
Perhaps one of the first thing you'll notice about the Abit Fatal1ty is the packaging. It absolutely screams high end, ultra performance, for the most demanding of the enthusiasts only! Flip back the front panel of the box and you'll see what I'm talking about.
Through those little plastic windows we get a sneak peak at some few portions of the board, the included SLI bridge, and the 7.1 channel Hi-Def sound card. More on that later. But what else hides inside?
Now when I opened this box up, I was quite impressed. The bundled hardware that Abit includes with the Fatal1ty is absolutely astonishing. With most manufacturers, you may get a couple SATA cables, driver CD and some instructional booklet telling you how to put it all together. I can honestly say it hurts when you buy a board for the 4 SATA ports, but they only give you 2 cables.
Here's a listing of everything included with the Abit AN9 32X Fatal1ty mother board. There proverbial kitchen sink is probably in there somewhere too.
- 6 SATA Cables
- 1 Rounded IDE Cable
- 1 Rounded Floppy Cable
- USB/IEEE1394 Combo Bracket
- I/O Shield with Fan
- SLI Bridge with Retention Bracket
- Driver CD with 32 and 64 bit RAID Driver Disks
- User Manual
- Quick Installation Guide Booklet
- µGuru User Manual
- Promotional Pamphlet
Now that's one of the most extensive packages I've seen in quite some time. I'll run through everything quickly, but I'm going to have to break things up a bit. Normally, I would just line up all of the bundled hardware in our photo booth and snap a quick picture with my camera. Not in this case. Because of the amount of hardware bundled, one big picture just wouldn't cut it. So, I took grouped pictures. It's just to make things look a little bit better. We'll start with the basics of connectivity.
It's nice that Abit included a SATA cable for every available port on this board. Those six SATA cables are nice, and rounded IDE and Floppy cables are a must. No more fighting with flat ribbon cables for me. And I really like that USB/IEEE 1394 Combo Bracket. A second IDE cable would have been nice, say for the fact that the Fatal1ty only comes with one IDE port. Oh well, can't win 'em all.
Normally, a manufacturer will supply the end user with one USB bracket and one 1394 bracket, sucking up two free rear PCI slots. I've been waiting for someone to do this, and Abit has done it. Combining all those ports into one bracket saves space. Now if they could only merge those three headers into one solid block for connection to the motherboard. If someone could turn those three cables/three connectors into a single cable/single connector design, they'd have my applause.
Moving on, the rear I/O shield is pretty normal, except for that portion that has been turned into a fan grill. That included fan mounts over top, helping to expel hot air from a case. Nice, but perhaps not totally necessary. The SLI bridge is to be expected for a board running Nvidias flagship nForce chipset design. The SLI bridge retention bracket helps too, but only with those double wide cards. All in all, this portion of the bundle is adequate.
The software included is simple. A pair of RAID driver disks for both 32 and 64 bit based operating systems (being either plain old Windows XP Home/Pro or XP64 Pro). I suspect most wouldn't use these RAID drivers, though a few might. The Abit Driver CD is quite the same with the usual host of chipset drivers, audio drivers and the sort. There's the user manual on there and some utilities like Adobe Acrobat Reader, the Award BIOS Flash utility and the latest in DirectX 9.0c. In the last section we have the Abit Utilities. The RAID drivers can be found there too, along with the µGuru Utility.
This µGuru Utility isn't anything new per say. Many have tried this before, and many have failed. It's a simple desktop application you can run in Windows that will monitor your hardware temperatures and voltages. Pretty simple and not entirely useful for the true enthusiast. The µGuru Utility is your basic motherboard monitoring tool, allowing you to check system tempatures, voltage settings, and fan speeds. This really isn't of much help in any case, aside from the rare instance where you might have to diagnose a problem, such as unexpected shut downs. Perhaps your CPU is running just a little too hot, and the µGuru Utility lets you know. It's basically a fancy desktop version of everything you would see in the BIOS. Now though I had considered snapping screenshots of every single menu in the µGuru Utility, I decided just to write about it. After all, it isn't anything I'd consider unique to Abit or the Fatal1ty.
There is also a mode selection menu where you can choose between a number of speed settings. Default, Turbo, Normal, Quiet, up to 3 user defined preferences, and an Auto Drive feature. Again, these features are all there in the BIOS, as they have been for years. And though it's nothing but eye candy, there is a transparency setting for this µGuru Utility. Once more, this is nothing new as Nvidia has been doing this for years now with their drivers and control panels. There was however one µGuru feature that I did like, and that was the Auto Drive feature. This allows users to add a specific program to a list, and select which speed setting mode it should run in. Running 3D games in Turbo Mode makes perfect sense, while running office programs or DVD playback programs in Quiet Mode will save some sanity in the absense of droning fans. In the end, the µGuru Utility is okay for the average user. But honestly, I would never use the µGuru as it caused both the keyboard and mouse to lock-up on every other boot. That's right, absolutly no response from either the kerboard or mouse. When I uninstalled µGuru, evrything returned to normal. Kinda odd, and just a little bit dissapointing.
I will admit though, when using µGuru to push the Fatal1ty into Turbo Mode, the system did kick up a FSB rating just a couple megahertz shy of my final overclocking exploits in the BIOS. A job well done on that one Abit!
Another included Abit utility was the Flash Menu. It's been done before too, and Abit pulled this one off flawlessly. This utility allows users to flash their BIOS to the most current version right from the desktop. The interface is nice and the flashing procedure was perfectly painless. I considered snapping a pic or two, but it's basicly a smaller version of the fancy µGuru panels showen above.
The final bit of Abit software was for the most part, useless. The Black Box utility is meant to take a profile of your system to help diagnose problems. It records your processor type, video card, drivers and other hardware/software signatures of that sort. If you should ever encounter a problem, Black Box can be used to contact Abit is the hopes of resolving the problem. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this program to auto detect the installed hardware, nor the installed software. Every time I ran it, the application would hang for a couple of seconds, then exit. Again, this Black Box is pretty much useless. As for a picture; if it didn't work, I'm not going to bother.
Well, that pretty much covers all the little extras that came with our Abit Fatal1ty board. It's a very substantial bundle, and did impress quite a bit. Now we'll take a quick look at the board itself.